Today's DrupalFest post is on the lighter side. I am just going to talk about some of the podcasts I listen to related to Drupal, PHP, and software development in general. I'll try to cover all the Drupal podcasts I know about. Let me know in the comments if I have missed something. As for others, I am just listing those I listen to.

The past year has been a busy one for the Drupal Community Working Group (CWG), as we created a new "Community Health Team" and saw the stepping down of the last original member of the Conflict Resolution Team, George DeMet. As the CWG enters its 8th year, we feel it is our duty to continue to pursue our mission to "foster a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project and to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct". With this guiding principle, we have been focusing on both proactive and reactive tasks to help us achieve this goal. 

This annual report will serve as a summary of what we've accomplished over the past year, as well as a discussion of some of our goals for the near future.

Community Health Team

The Community Working Group was expanded during the first half of 2020 with the creation of the Community Health Team. The mission of this new team is to focus on proactive community health tasks including workshops and knowledge transfer. With the help of Tara King, the CWG membership coordinator, we structured the team into several groups. Although team members may do work across multiple groups, each of these groups is designed to, but not limited to, focus on a specific area:

• Community Event Support - provide resources and support related to the Code of Conduct for Drupal events.
• Community Health - provide opportunities to educate and train community members to be more effective contributors.
• Membership - to help identify and recruit community members for the CWG. 
• Ambassadors - provide expertise and advice related to geographic, cultural, and other differences both inside and outside the Drupal community.

Community Health Team members are not privy to Code of Conduct incident reports; however they must adhere to the CWG Code of Ethics.

Once the team was created and volunteers were found for the majority of the roles, we began having monthly meetings during the second half of 2020. The team has already completed a number of tasks including:

• Initial work on a Drupal Code of Conduct update.
• Documentation of CWG roles.
• Development of a group of community health representatives from other open source communities.
• Ongoing Code of Conduct contact workshops.
• Updates to the Drupal event Code of Conduct templates and playbook.
• Ongoing Mental Health First Aid workshops for community members.
• Blog posts related to community health.
• "Nudges" for Drupal Slack Workspace and issue queues.

Other, long term goals for the Community Health Team include providing an on-ramp for the Conflict Resolution Team and identifying and presenting additional community-health-related workshops for the community, 

Conflict Resolution Team

After six years on the Conflict Resolution team, including several years as its chair, George DeMet retired from the team at the end of 2020. We cannot understate how much of an impact George has had on the CWG and the Drupal community, often working behind the scenes. We are fortunate that George has agreed to stay on as a member of the Community Health Team where he will be focusing on updating the Drupal Code of Conduct. 

During 2020, in addition to the creation of the Community Health Team, the Conflict Resolution Team continued to work on on-going and new Code of Conduct related issues. During our weekly meetings, we generally work on three types of tasks:

• Internal business - examples include recruitment, public blog posts and presentations, Aaron Winborn Award, event organizer requests.
• External, old business - ongoing conflict resolution tasks normally brought to us from community members.
• External, new business - new conflict resolution tasks, normally brought to us from community members.

While some conflict resolution tasks can be resolved quickly (a few days), we normally have several long-term, on-going issues that can take anywhere from weeks to months to resolve. Most of the long-term issues include ongoing personality conflicts within the community, but we also routinely work with community members who had previously had their community privileges limited on plans and tasks to have those privileges restored (see our Balancing Accountability and Compassion in the Drupal Community blog post).

What types of conflict resolution issues do we work on?

We decided to perform a quantitative analysis of the number and types of conflict resolution issues we work on, comparing data from 2019 with 2020. Our methodology allowed us to assign one or two of the following categories to each new issue we received during 2019 and 2020:

• Social media conflict
• Issue queue conflict
• Drupal Slack workspace conflict
• In-person Drupal event conflict
• Virtual Drupal event conflict
• Not CWG domain
• Other - examples include content issues on Drupal.org, issues related to local Drupal communities (but not directly related to an event), interpersonal issues occurring in areas not covered by any of the other categories.

In terms of overall number of incidents, while 2019 had 35 total new reported incidents to the CWG, 2020 has slightly less than half of that, with 17 new reported incidents. 

• While the number of incidents occurring at in-person Drupal events dropped from six in 2019 to none in 2020, this doesn't account for the entire reduction of total incidents between 2019 and 2020. We also saw fewer social media and Drupal Slack workspace conflicts, but the biggest drop was in the "Other" category, which saw a decrease from ten incidents in 2019 to just two in 2020. 
• Obviously, the drop in in-person incident reports is directly related to the pandemic.
• What else can we attribute the dramatic drop in incident reports to? We hope that the formation of the Community Health Team is having some effect, but we're not so naive to attribute the entire decrease to its creation and actions during 2020. 

2019

2020

Total number of new reported issues

35

17

Social media conflict

7

1

Issue queue conflict

9

9

Drupal Slack workspace conflict

5

1

In-person Drupal event conflict

6

0

Virtual Drupal event conflict

0

2

Not CWG domain

4

3

Other

10

2

Looking forward Conflict resolution team membership

One of the primary goals of the conflict resolution team in the first part of 2020 was expanding the size of the team. With the recent departure of George DeMet and the decrease in our workload (thanks to fewer incident reports and the amazing work of the Community Health Team), we decided this was a good time to recruit new team members. 

We had six amazing community members approach us about joining the team, and will be inviting a new member(s) to the team in the next few weeks. One of the main goals of the Community Health team was to provide an on-ramp to the Conflict Resolution Team. Those community members who were not extended an offer to join the Conflict Resolution Team will be asked to join the Community Health Team in a capacity of their choosing, if they haven’t joined already.

As part of the process of having new members join the team, we implemented (and are in the process of documenting) a new on-boarding process, where new team members are considered "trial members" for a maximum of 5 months. During this period, new members will mainly shadow the team and have limited access to historical conflict resolution reports. At the conclusion of the trial period new members will either become regular members or be asked to leave the team. As is prescribed by our charter, all trial members must be approved by the CWG Review Panel. 

Community Health Team

Now that our Community Health Team is a year old and has some experience under its belt, we have high hopes that they will continue to be a force for good in the community. Our plans for the next year include finding and presenting additional workshops, completing the aforementioned Drupal Code of Conduct update, and assisting with the expansion of the yet-to-have-a-good-name group of community health volunteers from various open source communities.

My pickle of a problem

Previously, I have discussed my current work situation, which revolves around the fact that my organization is moving away from Drupal. This situation has led me to ask the question to Drupal or not to Drupal. To date, I’m committed to helping them migrate from Drupal to Sitecore.

I’ve also decided to remain committed to the sustainability of the Webform module. The “sustainability” of the Webform module has different meanings to different people and organizations within the Drupal community. Individuals want to know that there are resources available to provide guidance, review patches, and commit code to a project. An organization using Drupal and the Webform module wants to know that the code is stable, maintained, and secure. For me, I’d like to see compensation for my time in return for my continued commitment to the sustainability of the Webform module.

Being compensated to contribute and maintain code within an open source project can take on many forms. An organization could sponsor my work on the Webform module. At the same time, these opportunities are rare within our community. Frankly, assuming that a single organization could take on the responsibility of something like the Webform module might not be financially feasible.

Stepping back from my problem, there might be a more general solution for improving the Webform module’s sustainability. Still, sustainability is a pickle of a problem for an open source project like the Webform module.

The Webform module’s pickle of a problem

The pickle of a problem around the Webform module, Drupal, and Open Source is that people assume that everything is free. Open source code is free to use and distribute. The ecosystem built around the Webform module reinforces the notion that everything is free because we rarely put a “price tag” next to our...Read More

Today's post is going to be a quick one; not because it is an easy topic but because a lot has been said about it already. Today, I want to share my thoughts on decoupling Drupal; thoughts that are mainly a mix of borrowed thoughts from several places. I will try to link where I can but I can't separate my thoughts from borrowed ones now. Anyway, by the end of the post, you might have read a lot of things you already knew and hopefully, one or two new things about Decoupling Drupal.

Learn, connect, and build at DrupalCon and make it work with your schedule.

Learn, connect, and build at DrupalCon and make it work with your schedule.

1xINTERNET is participating in DrupalCon NA this year as Hallway Track sponsor, as well as hosting few sessions. Read this blog to get information about the talks our team is doing during this online DrupalCon.

1xINTERNET is participating in DrupalCon NA this year as Hallway Track sponsor, as well as hosting few sessions. Read this blog to get information about the talks our team is doing during this online DrupalCon.

Drupal is facing an end-of-life this year: Support for Drupal 8 will be discontinued as of 11/2/2021. Since Drupal 8 will no longer be supported after the EOL, we can only urge all Drupal 8 site owners to upgrade their system to Drupal 9 in time.

Drupal is facing an end-of-life this year: Support for Drupal 8 will be discontinued as of 11/2/2021. Since Drupal 8 will no longer be supported after the EOL, we can only urge all Drupal 8 site owners to upgrade their system to Drupal 9 in time.

I missed joining the DrupalNYC meetup today. Well, I almost missed it but I was able to catch the last 10 minutes or so. That got me thinking about events and that's the topic for today–Drupal events and their impact on my life. I travelled extensively for 4-5 years before the pandemic restrictions were put in place and since then, I have attended events around the world while sitting in my chair. These travels and events are responsible for my learnings and my professional (and personal) growth. And these are the perspectives that have given me the privilege that I enjoy.

I missed joining the DrupalNYC meetup today. Well, I almost missed it but I was able to catch the last 10 minutes or so. That got me thinking about events and that's the topic for today–Drupal events and their impact on my life. I travelled extensively for 4-5 years before the pandemic restrictions were put in place and since then, I have attended events around the world while sitting in my chair. These travels and events are responsible for my learnings and my professional (and personal) growth. And these are the perspectives that have given me the privilege that I enjoy.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

If you use Drupal at all, you've probably already heard that 2021 is Drupal's 20th anniversary! Pretty cool. :) Check out wikipedia to see Drupal's initial release by Dries Buytaert was January 15, 2001.

In honor of Drupal's 20th year, DrupalFest is this month which is built around the popular DrupalCon North America event. Due to the pandemic, DrupalCon NA is online again this year, but this allows for a more unique content and contribution event model. The events are spread out throughout the month of April to allow for more participation and better integration into everyone's schedule. Hope to "see you" next week at DrupalCon or at one of the Drupal summits!

read more

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

If you use Drupal at all, you've probably already heard that 2021 is Drupal's 20th anniversary! Pretty cool. :) Check out wikipedia to see Drupal's initial release by Dries Buytaert was January 15, 2001.

In honor of Drupal's 20th year, DrupalFest is this month which is built around the popular DrupalCon North America event. Due to the pandemic, DrupalCon NA is online again this year, but this allows for a more unique content and contribution event model. The events are spread out throughout the month of April to allow for more participation and better integration into everyone's schedule. Hope to "see you" next week at DrupalCon or at one of the Drupal summits!

read more

Explore a breakdown of some of the challenges and solutions for you to consider in order to build a great Drupal team.

Explore a breakdown of some of the challenges and solutions for you to consider in order to build a great Drupal team.

While there are many companies based in open source software that are successfully funding themselves based on consultancy and other services, that’s not necessarily true of individual contributors. As part of our series of talks with Open Source Leaders, Tag1 Consulting’s Managing Director Michael Meyers, VP of Software Engineering Fabian Franz, and Yjs founder Kevin Jahns talk with Dries Buytaert about open source projects and communities. This talk focuses on open source project sustainability and funding. Dries talks about some of the key points that made Drupal successful, and how the project and the Drupal Association have changed and pivoted based on challenges like the coronavirus pandemic. Dries also gives some pointers on how he started to sell his project to others, and how that started to change his role in the project over time, from the primary developer, to a project head focused on visibility. - Part 1 ### Additional resources - Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: https://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998 - Featured Essay: Elinor Ostrom’s work on Governing The Commons: An Appreciation --- _For a transcript of this video, see [Transcript: Open...

Read more lynette@tag1co… Wed, 04/07/2021 - 09:20

While there are many companies based in open source software that are successfully funding themselves based on consultancy and other services, that’s not necessarily true of individual contributors. As part of our series of talks with Open Source Leaders, Tag1 Consulting’s Managing Director Michael Meyers, VP of Software Engineering Fabian Franz, and Yjs founder Kevin Jahns talk with Dries Buytaert about open source projects and communities. This talk focuses on open source project sustainability and funding. Dries talks about some of the key points that made Drupal successful, and how the project and the Drupal Association have changed and pivoted based on challenges like the coronavirus pandemic. Dries also gives some pointers on how he started to sell his project to others, and how that started to change his role in the project over time, from the primary developer, to a project head focused on visibility. - Part 1 ### Additional resources - Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: https://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998 - Featured Essay: Elinor Ostrom’s work on Governing The Commons: An Appreciation --- _For a transcript of this video, see [Transcript: Open...

Read more lynette@tag1co… Wed, 04/07/2021 - 09:20

Read our roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

Drupal.org Updates Drupal's 20th Birthday Year

As we close out the first quarter of 2021, we continue the celebration of 20 years of Drupal with #DrupalFest and #DrupalCon!

#DrupalFest is a month-long celebration of all things Drupal, taking place online all around the world. DrupalFest lasts throughout the month of April. Most events are free, and we encourage everyone to attend, and even submit your own!

DrupalCon is right around the corner from April 12-16, happening online. This year's DrupalCon reflects a renewed focus on the strategic initiatives that drive innovation in Drupal. Each day has a half day of live programming for and then a half day of contribution, and all personas are welcome! Join us!

Increased focus on Strategic Initiatives

Speaking of strategic initiatives, the current primary initiatives being highlighted at DrupalCon and beyond are: 

• Decoupled Menus - This initiative focuses on creating standardized tools and libraries for decoupled Drupal, starting with the menu system. This is the first step in making JavaScript front-ends a central part of the Drupal project. 
• Easy out of the Box - This mega-initiative combines the efforts of Layout Builder, Media, and Claro to help empower content editors in Drupal to take advantage of the best that Drupal can offer.
• Automatic Updates - This initiative is focused on the #1 most requested feature in Drupal: automatic updates. The initiative is building a robust and secure system for automatically updating Drupal, starting with security and patch releases.
• Drupal 10 Readiness - The Drupal innovation train keeps rolling! The Drupal 10 Readiness initiative is rallying the community around what we need to reach our Drupal 10 release date, and helping site owners ensure they're ready for the upgrade when the time comes.

In addition to the content at DrupalCon, you can find ways to get involved in any of these initiatives by checking out the Drupal Strategic Initiative section on Drupal.org.

Decoupled Menu Initiative Support

General projects are a new content type on Drupal.org for code that does not fall into the neat categories of module, theme, or distribution. Instead, these can cover things like JavaScript Components, Drush Extensions, Install Profiles, Libraries, etc.

This is the first step in making Drupal a project greater than just PHP. This capability leans into Drupal's future in Decoupled applications, and in digital experiences beyond the web browser. 

Since the launch of general projects as a new content type on Drupal.org the Decoupled Menu Initiative has made great progress on creating standardized endpoints/libraries for decoupled Drupal solutions.

At DrupalCon North America the Decoupled Menus initiative leads invite you to a hackathon to begin to create applications for this work.

The rapid movement on this initiative shows how quickly the Drupal community can pivot into more robust and standardized Decoupled implementations, and furthers Drupal's lead in the marketplace.

Easy Out of the Box Support

For the Easy Out of the Box team, the Drupal Association has been focused on connecting the initiative leads to the Drupal Contribution Mentoring team, so that at DrupalCon there will be a variety of onramps to help new contributors support this work.

Easy Out of the Box is effectively three initiatives in one, focused on Layouts, Media, and the Claro administrative theme, so people with interest in any of those areas are more than welcome.

AutoUpdates Initiative Cross-Project Collaboration

The Drupal Association Engineering team continues its close collaboration with the AutoUpdates initiative team. Because AutoUpdates requires a server side component that will live on Drupal.org infrastructure, the engineering team needs to be closely involved.

This initiative has also had a heavy focus on cross-project collaboration - with three CMS partners in the PHP ecosystem collaborating together on the basic principles of supporting securely signed update packages.

      

We're also collaborating with other partners, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundations 'TUF'(The Update Framework) team, and the team behind Composer. 

        

At DrupalCon North America the TUF team will be presenting about securing software package delivery - a topic that is sure to be interesting for all.

Drupal 10 Readiness Support

Drupal 10 is slated for release in June of 2022, which is only a little bit more than a year away. Fortunately, Drupal 10 follows the continuous innovation model of Drupal development that was so successful in the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. In essence, so long as site owners are up to date with the latest version of Drupal 9 they should be able to make the jump very easily. The only area of concern is deprecated code.

To that end, the Drupal Association engineering team collaborated with Gábor Hotjsy to set up automate code deprecation checking using the DrupalCI infrastructure. This allows the team to understand the most used instances of deprecated code, so that contributed module maintainers can be made aware of the need to update, and so that the Drupal Rector team(supported by Palantir.net) can begin creating automatic deprecation patches.

GitLab Merge Request Updates

Last year, Drupal.org migrated our community contribution tools to GitLab, by integrating the existing Drupal.org issue queues with GitLab's merge request functionality.

Thanks to these improvements, the complete contribution lifecycle can be completed entirely in the browser. As a contributor to Drupal you no longer need to use command line git, install a local development environment, or use a local IDE in order to make your contributions.

Since the initial launch, we've received feedback from many people in the community about improvements to usability with the Drupal.org issue queue integration. Looking at the child issues of this issue, we can see rapid usability improvements that have sped the pace of contribution.

More recently, we worked with our partners at Tugboat.qa to release live deployment previews of your code changes - first for Drupal Core, but now available for contributed projects on Drupal.org as well. This means that even reviewing visual changes or seeing your code deployed to a site can all be done without leaving your browser. This is a huge boon to all contributors, but especially to usability and accessibility experts who can much more easily view the impact of changes across issues.

Major improvements to Community events

In collaboration with the Events Organizers Working Group, the Drupal Association has updated the Drupal.org Community Events section. This new section represents a central repository for all of the events taking place across the Drupal Community, and will ultimately be the replacement for Groups.Drupal.org.

This section allows anyone in the community to submit their events, whether online or in-person, and provides a variety of views to help people find events they'd like to attend. Events can be filtered by type(con, camp, meetup, training, etc); proposed events can be submitted to help avoid scheduling conflicts; and calls for content/speakers can be promoted.

A feed of these events is made available for 3rd party tools built by the community, which is already being used to feed Drupical.com.

Local events are the heart of our community, so we hope that you'll help us by submitting your local events to this new tool!

Documentation updates

Led by community volunteer u/jhodgdon, Drupal.org's documentation tools have seen a variety of updates. In particular, the Drupal contributor guide is now much more complete, helping folks who are new to contribution in Drupal find a place to fit in and get started.

We've also deployed improvements that make it easier to understand whether the documentation you're reading is up-to-date, and how to report problems if you find them.

If you're looking for somewhere to contribute - helping to update documentation is a wonderful place to start!

Coming soon: Discover Drupal Portal

Coming up at DrupalCon is the announcement of a new program: Discover Drupal. This program is part of the Drupal Association's talent and education initiatives, and represents the Drupal Association's commitment to growing the Drupal talent pool and increasing diversity in our community.

With the official announcement just around the corner we won't spoil the details here, but very soon you'll be able to check out the new web portal for the Discover Drupal program and find out what it's all about.

Infrastructure Updates

Over the course of the last quarter the Drupal Association engineering team has provided a variety of feature updates for the Drupal project in terms of testing infrastructure: 

• PHP8 Testing support - The Drupal Association provided PHP8 testing environments in DrupalCI, and so Drupal versions 9.1 and beyond are all fully PHP 8 compatible.Staying on the leading edge of compatibility gives Drupal the advantage of improved performance and security, and sets us up for success when it's time for Drupal 10.

• Code Standards test for Drupal Core - Drupal Core tests now provide code standards testing results, saving a laborious manual step when reviewing core contributions.
• GitLabCI/Pipelines - The Drupal Association has also enabled GitLabCI/Pipelines for these new general projects. This is a precursor to moving to GitLabCI for all Drupal CI uses. With direct maintainer control of the CI configuration for these projects, we can see automated workflows to support a wider variety of projects - allowing for more innovation. However, we need to be cognizant of cost controls as we open up this capability.

The year is off to a fast-paced, productive start and as always it is humbling and gratifying to see the great work that the community accomplishes with the tools the Drupal Association provides.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who make it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular, we want to thank: 

• Acquia - *NEW* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Google - *NEW* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Mediacurrent - *UPGRADE* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Tag1 - *UPGRADE* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Acro Media - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Centarro - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Elevated Third - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• FFW - Renewing Signature Supporting Partner
• Palantir - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Annertech - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
• Chapter Three - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Cyber-Duck - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Dropsolid - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• EPAM - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Electric Citizen - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Investis Digital - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Kanopi Studios - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Message Agency - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Platform.sh - Renewing Premium Hosting Supporter
• Promet Source - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Ramsalt Lab  - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
• undpaul - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• ANNAI - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Arizona State University - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Atlantic.net - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Bear Group - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Berger Schmidt - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Chromatic - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Code Koalas - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Factorial GmbH - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Forum One - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Green Geeks - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Hostinger - Renewing Supporting Partner
• Inclind - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Interpersonal Frequency - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Intracto - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Inviqa - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Isovera Consulting - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• KWALL - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Liip AG - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Mobomo - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• MOURI Tech - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• One Shoe Interactive - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• OpenSense Labs - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Position2 - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• PSW Group - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Redfin Solutions - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• UEBERBIT GmbH - *NEW* Classic Supporting Partner
• Unic AG - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• UniMity Solutions Pvt Limited - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• University of Virginia - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Urban Insight - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Vardot - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• weKnow - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Avalara - *NEW* Community Technology Partner
• Bluehorn Digital - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Docomo Innovations - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• GAC Digital Solutions - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Old Moon Digital - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Symetris - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Walden O'Neill - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.
Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

Read our roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

Drupal.org Updates Drupal's 20th Birthday Year

As we close out the first quarter of 2021, we continue the celebration of 20 years of Drupal with #DrupalFest and #DrupalCon!

#DrupalFest is a month-long celebration of all things Drupal, taking place online all around the world. DrupalFest lasts throughout the month of April. Most events are free, and we encourage everyone to attend, and even submit your own!

DrupalCon is right around the corner from April 12-16, happening online. This year's DrupalCon reflects a renewed focus on the strategic initiatives that drive innovation in Drupal. Each day has a half day of live programming for and then a half day of contribution, and all personas are welcome! Join us!

Increased focus on Strategic Initiatives

Speaking of strategic initiatives, the current primary initiatives being highlighted at DrupalCon and beyond are: 

• Decoupled Menus - This initiative focuses on creating standardized tools and libraries for decoupled Drupal, starting with the menu system. This is the first step in making JavaScript front-ends a central part of the Drupal project. 
• Easy out of the Box - This mega-initiative combines the efforts of Layout Builder, Media, and Claro to help empower content editors in Drupal to take advantage of the best that Drupal can offer.
• Automatic Updates - This initiative is focused on the #1 most requested feature in Drupal: automatic updates. The initiative is building a robust and secure system for automatically updating Drupal, starting with security and patch releases.
• Drupal 10 Readiness - The Drupal innovation train keeps rolling! The Drupal 10 Readiness initiative is rallying the community around what we need to reach our Drupal 10 release date, and helping site owners ensure they're ready for the upgrade when the time comes.

In addition to the content at DrupalCon, you can find ways to get involved in any of these initiatives by checking out the Drupal Strategic Initiative section on Drupal.org.

Decoupled Menu Initiative Support

General projects are a new content type on Drupal.org for code that does not fall into the neat categories of module, theme, or distribution. Instead, these can cover things like JavaScript Components, Drush Extensions, Install Profiles, Libraries, etc.

This is the first step in making Drupal a project greater than just PHP. This capability leans into Drupal's future in Decoupled applications, and in digital experiences beyond the web browser. 

Since the launch of general projects as a new content type on Drupal.org the Decoupled Menu Initiative has made great progress on creating standardized endpoints/libraries for decoupled Drupal solutions.

At DrupalCon North America the Decoupled Menus initiative leads invite you to a hackathon to begin to create applications for this work.

The rapid movement on this initiative shows how quickly the Drupal community can pivot into more robust and standardized Decoupled implementations, and furthers Drupal's lead in the marketplace.

Easy Out of the Box Support

For the Easy Out of the Box team, the Drupal Association has been focused on connecting the initiative leads to the Drupal Contribution Mentoring team, so that at DrupalCon there will be a variety of onramps to help new contributors support this work.

Easy Out of the Box is effectively three initiatives in one, focused on Layouts, Media, and the Claro administrative theme, so people with interest in any of those areas are more than welcome.

AutoUpdates Initiative Cross-Project Collaboration

The Drupal Association Engineering team continues its close collaboration with the AutoUpdates initiative team. Because AutoUpdates requires a server side component that will live on Drupal.org infrastructure, the engineering team needs to be closely involved.

This initiative has also had a heavy focus on cross-project collaboration - with three CMS partners in the PHP ecosystem collaborating together on the basic principles of supporting securely signed update packages.

      

We're also collaborating with other partners, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundations 'TUF'(The Update Framework) team, and the team behind Composer. 

        

At DrupalCon North America the TUF team will be presenting about securing software package delivery - a topic that is sure to be interesting for all.

Drupal 10 Readiness Support

Drupal 10 is slated for release in June of 2022, which is only a little bit more than a year away. Fortunately, Drupal 10 follows the continuous innovation model of Drupal development that was so successful in the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. In essence, so long as site owners are up to date with the latest version of Drupal 9 they should be able to make the jump very easily. The only area of concern is deprecated code.

To that end, the Drupal Association engineering team collaborated with Gábor Hotjsy to set up automate code deprecation checking using the DrupalCI infrastructure. This allows the team to understand the most used instances of deprecated code, so that contributed module maintainers can be made aware of the need to update, and so that the Drupal Rector team(supported by Palantir.net) can begin creating automatic deprecation patches.

GitLab Merge Request Updates

Last year, Drupal.org migrated our community contribution tools to GitLab, by integrating the existing Drupal.org issue queues with GitLab's merge request functionality.

Thanks to these improvements, the complete contribution lifecycle can be completed entirely in the browser. As a contributor to Drupal you no longer need to use command line git, install a local development environment, or use a local IDE in order to make your contributions.

Since the initial launch, we've received feedback from many people in the community about improvements to usability with the Drupal.org issue queue integration. Looking at the child issues of this issue, we can see rapid usability improvements that have sped the pace of contribution.

More recently, we worked with our partners at Tugboat.qa to release live deployment previews of your code changes - first for Drupal Core, but now available for contributed projects on Drupal.org as well. This means that even reviewing visual changes or seeing your code deployed to a site can all be done without leaving your browser. This is a huge boon to all contributors, but especially to usability and accessibility experts who can much more easily view the impact of changes across issues.

Major improvements to Community events

In collaboration with the Events Organizers Working Group, the Drupal Association has updated the Drupal.org Community Events section. This new section represents a central repository for all of the events taking place across the Drupal Community, and will ultimately be the replacement for Groups.Drupal.org.

This section allows anyone in the community to submit their events, whether online or in-person, and provides a variety of views to help people find events they'd like to attend. Events can be filtered by type(con, camp, meetup, training, etc); proposed events can be submitted to help avoid scheduling conflicts; and calls for content/speakers can be promoted.

A feed of these events is made available for 3rd party tools built by the community, which is already being used to feed Drupical.com.

Local events are the heart of our community, so we hope that you'll help us by submitting your local events to this new tool!

Documentation updates

Led by community volunteer u/jhodgdon, Drupal.org's documentation tools have seen a variety of updates. In particular, the Drupal contributor guide is now much more complete, helping folks who are new to contribution in Drupal find a place to fit in and get started.

We've also deployed improvements that make it easier to understand whether the documentation you're reading is up-to-date, and how to report problems if you find them.

If you're looking for somewhere to contribute - helping to update documentation is a wonderful place to start!

Coming soon: Discover Drupal Portal

Coming up at DrupalCon is the announcement of a new program: Discover Drupal. This program is part of the Drupal Association's talent and education initiatives, and represents the Drupal Association's commitment to growing the Drupal talent pool and increasing diversity in our community.

With the official announcement just around the corner we won't spoil the details here, but very soon you'll be able to check out the new web portal for the Discover Drupal program and find out what it's all about.

Infrastructure Updates

Over the course of the last quarter the Drupal Association engineering team has provided a variety of feature updates for the Drupal project in terms of testing infrastructure: 

• PHP8 Testing support - The Drupal Association provided PHP8 testing environments in DrupalCI, and so Drupal versions 9.1 and beyond are all fully PHP 8 compatible.Staying on the leading edge of compatibility gives Drupal the advantage of improved performance and security, and sets us up for success when it's time for Drupal 10.

• Code Standards test for Drupal Core - Drupal Core tests now provide code standards testing results, saving a laborious manual step when reviewing core contributions.
• GitLabCI/Pipelines - The Drupal Association has also enabled GitLabCI/Pipelines for these new general projects. This is a precursor to moving to GitLabCI for all Drupal CI uses. With direct maintainer control of the CI configuration for these projects, we can see automated workflows to support a wider variety of projects - allowing for more innovation. However, we need to be cognizant of cost controls as we open up this capability.

The year is off to a fast-paced, productive start and as always it is humbling and gratifying to see the great work that the community accomplishes with the tools the Drupal Association provides.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who make it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular, we want to thank: 

• Acquia - *NEW* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Google - *NEW* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Mediacurrent - *UPGRADE* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Tag1 - *UPGRADE* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Acro Media - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Centarro - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Elevated Third - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• FFW - Renewing Signature Supporting Partner
• Palantir - *UPGRADE* Signature Supporting Partner
• Annertech - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
• Chapter Three - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Cyber-Duck - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Dropsolid - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• EPAM - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Electric Citizen - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Investis Digital - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Kanopi Studios - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Message Agency - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Platform.sh - Renewing Premium Hosting Supporter
• Promet Source - *UPGRADE* Premium Supporting Partner
• Ramsalt Lab  - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
• undpaul - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• ANNAI - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Arizona State University - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Atlantic.net - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Bear Group - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Berger Schmidt - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Chromatic - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Code Koalas - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Factorial GmbH - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Forum One - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Green Geeks - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Hostinger - Renewing Supporting Partner
• Inclind - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Interpersonal Frequency - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Intracto - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Inviqa - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Isovera Consulting - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• KWALL - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Liip AG - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Mobomo - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• MOURI Tech - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• One Shoe Interactive - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• OpenSense Labs - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Position2 - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• PSW Group - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Redfin Solutions - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• UEBERBIT GmbH - *NEW* Classic Supporting Partner
• Unic AG - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• UniMity Solutions Pvt Limited - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• University of Virginia - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Urban Insight - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Vardot - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• weKnow - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Avalara - *NEW* Community Technology Partner
• Bluehorn Digital - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Docomo Innovations - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• GAC Digital Solutions - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Old Moon Digital - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Symetris - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Walden O'Neill - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.
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